A Decade of STO
It can be hard to believe, but not that long ago if you wanted to experience aStar Trekstory that didn’t involve watching a rerun, Cryptic Studios’Star Trek Onlinewas your only option.
Thankfully forTrekfans, things have changed since then, and there’s plenty ofTrekstuff to go around, includingStar Trek: Picard, which aired this week. That said, the game is still going strong and is due to celebrate its tenth anniversary later this month. I dropped a line to Thomas Marrone, a senior member on theSTOteam, in the hopes of learning more about his job,STO‘s plans for its tenth birthday, and maybe a few hints on if they’re planning somePicard-related crossover content.
[Note: The interview has been lightly edited for clarity.]
To start off, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do as part of theStar Trek Onlineteam?
Marrone: I’m the lead artist for the Starship, FX and UI art teams onStar Trek Online. I oversee the artists in those three disciplines, as well as creating ship and UI assets myself.
At this pointStar Trek Onlinehas hundreds of playable starships, quite a few of which are original designs unique to the game and its setting. Which of thoseSTOoriginals are you most proud of, and why?
Marron: It’s hard to pick your favorite child! I’ve been working onSTOfor about nine years and have been working on ships for around half that time. So I’ve directly worked on a lot of ships, but just as Scotty said in theTNGepisode, “Relics,” you never forget your first. For me, that would be the Pathfinder–class Long Range Science Vessel. It was one of our first T6 “conversions” and the first Starfleet ship that I designed and modeled from beginning to end. It has a special place in my heart and always will!
It’s not always obvious to players, but it can take a fairly long time to have a new ship added to the game. I remember a blog post from the STO website from some years back that put this time down at around 6 months on average. Has that time changed between then and now?
Marrone: The length of time to develop a ship soup-to-nuts varies quite a bit depending on how ambitious the project is. Ships that require a brand-new design, animations, and a new hull material require a lot longer than a more standard variant of an existing Starfleet ship, for example. Ships are also a very cross-discipline project, which requires systems designers, concept artists, ship artists, FX artists, animators, UI artists, and QA to all work together to bring them to life. It can take anywhere from a month to several months, depending on the scope.
One thing that has changed is we generally set aside more art time to make a ship model now than we used to; the ship models we create now can be four or five times more detailed than they were 10 years ago!
What do you most wish people knew about the process of designing content for a game likeStar Trek Online, or about your work as a designer?
Marron: Something that I never quite understood before I started working at Cryptic was just how many moving parts there are in game development. Many times you have a good idea but when you start to consider how to implement that idea, you realize how far-reaching the consequences will be and how much actual work that idea will take. Sometimes you still follow through, but many times you have to step back and reassess what needs to be done to make sure you may deliver an update on-time or without breaking other major systems in the game.
Star Trek Online‘s place in the larger canon of the TV shows has allowed it to add detail to a lot of things that were left otherwise unexplained onscreen. Things like giving a name to the unnamed aliens fromStar Trek:Enterprise‘s “Silent Enemy” episode or adding a whole backstory to unseen elements like the Iconians, and more recently, the Hur’q andStar Trek: Discovery‘s Mycelial Network. How have players (and perhaps non-playingTrekfans) reacted to these developments so far?
Marrone: I thinkStar Trek Onlineowes so much of its longevity to the fact that for a long time, it was one of the only ways to experience new multimediaStar Trekstories. We have built a great base of players who love how we tie the various threads of the tapestry ofTrekhistory together.Star Trekhas been around for over 50 years.STOhas been around for 10 of those years and we’ve done a lot of great storytelling to add to the breadth and depth of theStar Trekuniverse.
Thanks to newStar Trekmovies and TV series, particularlyStar Trek Discovery,STOhas had a fair amount of new sources to draw on for current and upcoming content. What kind ofPicard-based content canSTOplayers expect to see in the future?
Marrone: We are really excited about the opportunities that having ‘live’Star TrekTV affords us! While we can’t talk specifically about what players will see fromPicard, rest assured that we’re chomping at the bit to bring elements of that show intoStar Trek Online, just as we have elements fromDiscovery!
Speaking ofPicard, from the trailers and previews, that show appears to take place in a similar “future” to STO, i.e. some years afterStar Trek: Nemesis. How does Cryptic plan to account for conflicts that might arise from plot or setting details that get revealed in the show?
Marrone: Over the course of the game’s lifetime, we’ve done a lot of work to include content from a variety of timelines and universes, even including the Kelvin Timeline from the JJ Abrams films. Thankfully,Star Trekis replete with devices for doing so – retcons, time travel, and parallel dimensions are all tools we have in the toolbox and we know how to use them if we have to.
If someone gave you the power to add something fromStar Trek Online— like a race, a storyline, or a ship and crew — to the “official” Star Trek canon in the form of a movie or TV show, what would you most want thrown in?
Marrone: I think it’d have to be the Odyssey-classEnterprise-F! It was a privilege working with the collectible company Eaglemoss to create a physical model of the ship last year. Most recently, IDW Comics used the Odyssey-class for Picard’s flagship, theU.S.S. Verity, in thePicard Countdowncomic series. It has been wonderful to see the Odyssey appear in otherStar Trekmedia and I would love to see it appear on screen as well!
